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As someone who recently said, “i should have a look at common lisp again”, and even installed quicklisp and played around again, I can atest to the fact that I probably would have played more if I had known about this guide.
I’ve been spending a lot of time in Racket, though, jnstead. I’ve been mucking with lisps for a long time, and racket, as it is today, satisfies me the most. The docs and community are wonderful and extremely helpful.
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I appreciate your comments! Common Lisp can be really hard to start getting going with.
Yeah, I mean, the reason that it didn’t stick the first time I tried all those years ago, was that a friend pointed me to this little language, with a 56 page spec, called Scheme. :)
There’s a lot of amazing material out there in regards to Common Lisp, but I feel that Common Lisp is big enough that most of the books don’t leave you with a solid understanding. And, of course, none of the books, even Practical Common Lisp, really gives you the guidance to become a productive person. Sure, you might understand how to write some programs, but, it doesn’t prepare you for day to day.
Part of the reason Racket resonates with me, is simply that I’ve tinkered with a great many Scheme implementations, and Clojure, throughout the last 10 years or so–most recently with Guile. I didn’t stick with Clojure, mostly because of the JVM requirement, but it’s community taught me a lot, and made me appreciate things like SLIME, and tooling like leiningen, which most Scheme systems don’t have.
Racket, with raco, it’s extensively documented library and package system, Geiser (which was developed for Guile, but works with Racket, and I think chicken, too), and the community in general, however, makes me wish I would have just stuck around to watch it all unfold in 2006 when I first left PLT Scheme behind.
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Agreed on Racket. Racket has a surprisingly good story across a range of tasks. I’ve seldom found myself at a loss for a library–even if I’m too new / novice to figure it out.
I keep having this fantasy of creating an implementation of the R language for Racket. Then I realize that Racket is already kind of fun to do data tasks in (plotting was, in particular, a pleasant surprise). Maybe creation of a data.frame / pandas like data type in Racket would be enough to get started. Then, maybe if I wait around long enough, someone will take Jake Vanderplas’s idea to create a common dataframe lib for use across Python/R/Julia/etc.
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I keep having this fantasy of creating an implementation of the R language for Racket.
Seems like a really good idea to me, really. You’d likely just be adding some new syntax on top of a DSL that you create to do the computations, so you might decide to skip the syntax and just work in the raw DSL. :)
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When you’re setting up windows it asks you if you want to customize it or use “express settings” which include these things. You can also go turn them off later in settings. I don’t see why it’s a huge deal.
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Because it’s abuse-by-default. And, given that the value of privacy is often latent, the non-obvious nature of the collection increases the potential for abuse in the future.
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Forgive me for not wanting to dive into the code, but what exactly is this? There’s no README.
Exactly what it says on the tin: A Lobsters to Gopher gateway. Lobsters posts come in one end, and it comes out into a Gopher menu.
Is this what you’re talking about? I’ve never heard of that before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29
In 1993, I lobbied my boss hard to put the department’s data behind a Gopher server, as opposed to on the web as it was at the time. This is probably why I still have to work for a living instead of owning a fleet of private submarines.
I recently set up a gopher site for a friend of mine running for Seattle City Council (gopher.alonbassok.com) as something of a nerdy in-joke. He didn’t survive the primary, but I’m pretty certain there will be another run in his future. I’m currently paying $5/mo to digital ocean for the pleasures of being a gophermaster, and I’m contemplating setting up my own site on the same instance for novelty / maximization of investment reasons. I don’t know why I find this so fun, but I do. Probably the same reasons that you don’t own a fleet of private submarines.
Exactly. A simplistic, pre-web protocol. While not used today, it has its fans, and could be legitimately useful today.
I loved the idea of Gopher because it was quite easy to organize some information compared to how the web did it for a long time.